In 2017, Nintendo lost a patent lawsuit with Texas-based tech company iLife Technologies Inc. who claimed that the Wii, Wii Remote, and Wii U infringed on their patents. The suit filed by iLife back in 2013 claimed that Nintendo had infringed on their patents which include devices that "contain systems or methods for body movement detection, body movement evaluation, body movement analysis, receiving body movement signals, analyzing body movement signals, responding to body movement signals, and remotely monitoring body movement signals."The court decided that Nintendo had breached one of their patents and was ordered to pay iLife $10.1 million, less than what they originally wanted which was $150 million. Nintendo is currently seeking to appeal the decision.

There are unused icons in the system's BIOS that suggest the Wii remote had the capability to act like a TV remote. This feature would later be implemented in the Japanese-only TV Friend Channel, and later on the Wii U's GamePad.

Mii characters were originally planned to appear on the Famicom Disk System. However, other staff at ##Nintendo## didn't like the idea, so it was pushed to their list of possible future ideas. The idea was experimented with on the Nintendo 64 Disc System. It was initially believed that there was no way to use the Mii characters within games, and also that users who are not artistically proficient wouldn't be interested in the feature.

In September 2001, Nintendo quietly bought a minority stake in Tom Quinn's company 'Gyration'. They did this because he had a worldwide patent on gyrometer-based motion control technology, and had researched the field for a number of years. As part of the acquisition, Nintendo was granted licenses to use Quinn's motion control tech, as well as take advantage of his technological know-how.

The idea of having a speaker built into the Wii Remote came from game developer Yoot Saito (credited for the games Odama and Seaman) when he mentioned that the controller could ring like a phone or make noise along those lines. Many of the development teams thought they could make good use of it, and it was deemed worth the cost of including it in the Wii Remote.